ActiveState Platform Quick Start Guide

Joining your first Organization

When a colleague or ActiveState employee invites you to join the ActiveState Platform you will receive an email invitation to join a specific organization. You need to create your account for the ActiveState Platform, accept the licensing terms, and confirm that you want to join the organization.

Open the email invite you received from platform@activestate.com to join the organization.

Click the link in the email, or copy and paste the link text into your browser address bar. You will be redirected to the ActiveState Platform Create Account page.

Enter the requested information in the Create an Account page and click Create Account.

In the About to Join page, click Join to confirm that you want to join the organization you have been invited to.

Joining additional Organizations

The ActiveState Platform allows you to link more than one organization to your user account. This means that you can, for example, access your work projects and personal or side projects using a single account.

Open the email invite you received from platform@activestate.com to join the organization. You will receive a separate email invite for each organization you are invited to.

Click the link in the email, or copy and paste the link text into your browser address bar.

If you are prompted to sign in, enter your username or email and password and click Sign In.

In the About to Join page click Join to confirm that you want to join the organization you have been invited to.

Viewing your Dashboard

After you first sign in and join an organization, you are redirected to your profile page which includes your Dashboard.

Your Dashboard displays recent activity, such as security scans processed by Security & Compliance, the organizations you belong to, and the Projects you have access to. You can navigate to pages for working with each organization and managing the organizations you belong to.

Getting started with Projects

Projects provide access to the ActiveState language distributions, provided as downloadable installers, that are available to your Organization.

The distributions available to your Organization depend on the type ActiveState customer you are:

Enterprise Edition customers: You get access the custom language distribution builds that ActiveState provides on a quarterly basis. These are managed builds created and maintained by ActiveState.

Business Edition customers: You get access to a catalog projects for the business edition language you purchased. These are managed builds created and maintained by ActiveState.

OEM customers: You get access to the language distribution builds you are licensed to redistribute.

Important: ActiveState language distritutions are licensed solely in accordance with the terms of their respective license agreements and or
support level agreements, available at https://www.activestate.com/eulas/ or by logging in to My Account for your account details.

If you do not have access to the builds you expect to see, contact support@activestate.com. If you previously accessed your installers through My Account, you can continue to access them there until January 31, 2019.

Getting started with Security & Compliance

The Security & Compliance tab in each organization provides access to the security features of the Platform. Security & Compliance enables you to automatically identify out-of-date or insecure Python packages running in your environment. To begin, you need to complete a few configuration steps to specify the applications to scan and how to organize the scan results in the Platform.

Configuring Security & Compliance

Security & Compliance requires configuration to map the ActivePython interpreter you want to scan for vulnerabilities with the identity in the ActiveState Platform where you want to record the packages scanned and any details for any vulnerabilities identified.

Create an identity: An identity is a tracking identifier that organizes the results of security scans performed for one or more Python interpreters. For example, you could create a “Development” identity to track all security scans performed on development servers.

Click the ActiveState-SecurityScanner-0.5.5 button to begin the download.

Configure the Security & Compliance plugin on systems where interpreters run that you want to record scan data for. This involves two configuration steps:

Use the pip package manager to install the plugin. For example, for Python3 with pip3 installed, at the command prompt where you downloaded the plugin enter: python3 -m pip install ActiveState-SecurityScanner-0.5.1.tar.gz
For more detailed instructions, see Installing the Security & Compliance Plugin.

Download the activestate.config file to direct your security scan output to a specific identity. For details, see Configuring Identities On Linux or macOS, copy the file to the /etc directory if you want all security scans run on that computer to use the same identity. On Windows, create an ACTIVESTATE_CONFIG environment variable that points to your activestate.config file. For more information on configuration options, see Configuring Identities.

Run your applications and scripts with ActivePython interpreters that have the Security & Compliance plugin installed, and then check the Dashboard to see updates in Your Latest Activity. When the first security scan is complete you can view details in Security & Compliance tab for the organization associated with the identity.